Page 64 of Wraith

This Dylan said thank you when I changed his bandages.

This Dylan looks at me like I’m capable instead of broken.

And maybe that’s the difference.

Maybe that’s what’s changed. Not just him, but me. Old June would have believed him when he said I couldn’t be trusted to make my own choices. Old June would have accepted his control because it felt safer than being responsible for myself.

But New June threatened a veterinarian with a scalpel.

New June robbed a drug dealer and made him kiss her feet.

New June took control in bed and made a man twice her size beg and whimper and submit.

New June can take care of herself.

And maybe, maybe she can take care of someone else too. Not because she has to, not because she’s being controlled into it, but because she wants to.

I realize something that makes my throat tight and my chest warm and my hands stop shaking.

I walk to the bed.

My legs feel strange, like they’re not quite connected to my body, but they carry me there anyway.

He’s watching me, his grey eyes steady and patient, not pushing, just waiting.

I sit on the edge of the mattress. The springs creak softly beneath my weight. I reach out and cup his face in my hand, my thumb brushing across the bruise on his jaw.

“Dylan,” I say, and my voice comes out rougher than I intended.

“Yeah?”

I lean in. Press my lips to his. The kiss is soft. Gentle. Nothing like the desperate, hungry kisses from last night. This is different. This is honest. This is me telling him something I didn’t know I was ready to say.

When I pull back, he’s staring at me with an expression that makes my heart do something acrobatic in my chest.

I take a breath.

“I think I love you, too.”

Chapter Twenty-Six

June

“I think I love you, too.”

Oh, New June, what did you just do?

The words hang in the air between us, and my heart is doing something that feels like it’s trying to climb up my throat and escape through my mouth. I just told Dylan Mercer I love him. I said the words out loud. Made them real. And now they’re sitting there in the space between our faces and I can’t take them back and I don’t even know if I want to but I also don’t know what to do with the fact that I said them and he’s looking at me with those gray eyes that have gone soft in a way I’ve never seen before and my chest feels too tight and too open at the same time.

This is terrifying.

This is more terrifying than the Sons breaking down my apartment door. More terrifying than watching Wraith fight two armed men. More terrifying than threatening a veterinarian with a scalpel, or robbing a drug dealer, or any of the insanely responsible things I’ve done in the last twenty-four hours.

Because those things were just physical dangers. Just survival. New June being responsible and handling situations as they came.

This is different.

This is my heart. My actual heart. The part of me I’ve kept locked away and protected and refused to let him touch because letting him touch it before almost destroyed me.